“For Peronism there is only one class of men: those who work.” – Perón, 1946
It is commonplace to speak of social classes, which are stigmatized in categories that always respond to economic parameters, which in a capitalist and neoliberal system, as the dominant culture, fragments and divides the community.
From these convictions that become established over time, becoming naturalized, social behaviors that range from racism to social exclusion, from contempt to horror in being reflected in the destroyed “other”, the poor, the “failed”, the helpless, the marginal, that punishes the rejected with an image of hell.
Such categories that include social ascent, the established imaginary of happiness around what one has, not what one needs, of being “someone” regardless of what it costs, of transcending by virtue of accumulating beyond the limits of spending on living, are demands imbued by a generalized and dominant culture that colonizes peoples in order to subdue them.
That wrongly named middle class, monotax workers, merchants, professionals, service providers, owners of SMEs, are the ones who, from their hopes and aspirational utopias of “being someone”, adopt such attitudes, culturally colonized and positioned in subjugation socially, as is aptly described in the books by Jorge Bolívar and Franz Fannon respectively: Games and Strategies of Domination, and The Wretched of the Earth, with a prologue by Sartre.
This colonization, which has always been perpetrated by the conquistadors against the original peoples, acquires subtler forms of domination and exploitation over time, consolidating an axis of dependence that is not felt as such, but which operates in each of the daily facets of human life and which determines the sovereignty of peoples.
There is no longer a need for armies of explicit domination, nor for massive landings by corporations and the media, because a culture has already been installed, which the people themselves make their own and then pass on to their families via oral transmission. Florencio Sánchez illustrated this in his book Mi hijo el doctor (My Son the Doctor), a symbol of the upward social mobility of an era in which the extreme poverty experienced by immigrants was passed on to the professional generations of children.
Only Peronism allowed this path to be undertaken by the humble and unprotected Creoles, “the black heads” of Evita, a situation that consolidated a society impregnated with social justice, different from the European Welfare State from the social “spill” of the liberal bourgeois demo economic macro model, described in the Perónist organized community.
Hence, it is not only upward social mobility, nor the famous equality of opportunities, which are the axes of common dreams, but a society of equal conditions and good living, which marks the strategic slogan of Peronism: the happiness of the people as a concept and the greatness of the Nation as a common destiny to build a healthier, fairer and more cohesive society.
Tribute to fellow Peronist philosopher Jorge Bolívar